Rollback an update on RHEL/CentOS – A simple guide

Yum is default package manager for RPM based Linux distributions like RHEL, CentOS & is used to managing packages for the system. We can install, remove or update packages using the yum command. But can we rollback an update that has been installed on the system ?

Yes, we can easily rollback an installed updated using the yum with yum history command. We can easily rollback a small update for an installed service but downgrading a system to minor version is not recommended as it can lead to system instability. So in short we can rollover an update for small service like for httpd but rollback from RHEL 6.9 to 6.8 is not recommended.

Important Note:- Rollback of Selinux, selinux-policy-*, kernel, glibc (dependencies of glibc such as gcc) packages to older version is not supported.

We will now discuss how we can rollback an update using yum history command on RHEL/CentOS.